Housiness is an emotion; we have all experienced it but, like all emotion, it is hard to portray. Enter your house and you feel it. If you are used to living with many others then it is particularly strongly felt when everyone is out. There is the house with the familiar light patterns, scents, furniture like a stage set, and quiet; not necessarily silence, but excluded noise. Often people sit down for a moment and savour that, then set about their inner lives. A friend (with 5 children) once remarked that she didn't want to go on holiday to exotic or fabled places; she wanted all the others to do that and she would go on holiday in her house.
It is well known that elderly people taken from their house and put into ostensibly far better care conditions fade and die. That is not the worst of cases for many simply wither and survive.
So when I look at official housing statistics on prices and numbers and accessibility for diverse age- and income groups, and analyses of low-occupation patterns, and over-crowding, and read of planning to decant populations into new and better dwellings, none of it meets the notion of housiness.
Housiness and its irrefutable claim to recognition also results in people experiencing the social exclusion of finding work in their home area but with no chance of establishing themselves in a house in an independent adult role. It seems reasonable to expect longer or shorter migrations for work, then establishing a house is resolved there, but it is hard to find work but no chance of a house.
I agree there are some problems that have no general solution and can only be left to resolve themselves but this is essentially a small-scale solution, it doesn't resolve the widespread crisis in degenerating urban and transport environments that Raedwald's statistics on gross levels of under-occupation in inner urban areas (and some outer and highly desirable areas) evidence.
All this is worsened, and its solution further distanced, by a malign state fiscal policy that results in disproportionate investment in house ownership to the detriment of all other forms of investment, notably in the production of goods and services, that favours a dysfunctional form of saving.
Brown and his incompetence and unintended economic effects is worth another post.
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There might be a simple solution to encourage people to downsize their houses, just by giving any investment financed out of house sale proceeds exactly the same tax treatment and exemptions in terms of both income (for the income imputable to own house occupation is not taxed) and capital (no capital gain tax). The incentive to hang on to one’s capital would pass on from house ownership to investment in the production of good and services. Yet the Exchequer would lose nothing.
So why doesn't this get discussed?
Taxation levels are far too high, cutting in at far too low a level; this is a clear and effective proposal to shift such fiscally-induced behaviour and its undesirable unintended effects.
I could imagine my housiness feelings reducing under the offer of a smaller house that's easier to cope with and maintain, and more income.
Once the logjam starts to break up neighbourhood continuity (nearly as important) would become accessible too.
I `m not following this at all . People like to own houses .If they wanted more goods and Service they would spend their money on them. That and scarcity are the only reasons house prices go up .People want to live alone. So they do . What business is this of the damned state ? . If you taxed Capital gains on first property even more ( see stamp duty that evil tax) then it would be impossible to move . People want to move and have to , the economy needs them to . Access to the Ladder may be at a bottle neck but this would restrict property ownership to those with Capital . IE the rich. Property related Capital has the been the only engine of equality that is sustainable and you want to remove it ?
Furthermore I cannot begin to imagine the motivation of wishing the state to engineer the English not to be as they have been for a thousand years. Can`t we keep our houses and have less tax. That’s what I want. I want to exchequer to lose out . I consider the state organising my life to be an abhorrent thing whether or not it happens to work. I am not placid cow to be ushered from this healthy state to another until my function is redundant. Your describe the endearing attachment of the English to their home ( A better word ‘Home’ than ‘Housiness’ don’t you think ) but you see it as a delusion . I do not . The Hobbits , the Tiggywinkles , the Pooters the Womb burrows of Kenneth Grahame are laughed at but loved because we recognise the truth of their small desires. The need for a home , just as the country is a home .
For Orwell . England , ‘..was not a nation or a creed or a language or a state but a home’ . To the English everything is about a personal relationship to a place ( Scruton) which is why state boxes are treated with contempt by occupiers and everyone else In any case, in the real world, you could never let the government near that sort of revenue it would be 'and' not 'or'. It always is. Also , in reality it ‘ain`t never gonna happen’ so I would forget it .
Having said that I have , in all honesty , never heard anyone suggest that taxing property ownership was a good idea and I may well have missed the point .Are you going to follow this up HG ? I feel certain that you will be shaking your head sadly at my swivel eyed Ils ne passeront pas!" attitude to your bold new thinking . But then I am a Conservative I fear change.
Thought provoking not to say Panic provoking . You are on scintillating form HG
N, No suggestion of taxing house ownership was made; what is suggested is that those who have big, empty houses they might like to downsize in their own neighbourhoods would be able to transfer their investment- in -housing tax statuses (i.e. no capital gains tax,no what used to be called schedule A tax, I think, it was abolished long before I got near house-owning age but is sure to remain in the mind of Gordon) and transfer those taxation statuses to the investments made with their capital gains. What you made on your bigger house would continue to be treated the same for tax purposes though now it would be yielding an income rather than empty space in a too big a house.
There are drastically falling housing occupation levels in central London and some very nasty ideas being mooted on what might be done. Raise council taxes for low occupation levels? For instance? Agreed the huge rise in housing transaction costs has frozen what little desire there was to release property onto the market by those with no incentive to move. So those need removing too, but I can't see Brown letting go of revenue.
Camden (for instance) has been surveying occupation levels and setting standards; I think it's three rooms per individual, I'll have to check; but why are they doing this? what action are they planning on their gathered information?
The housiness word was a slayer-speak weakness. What it speaks of is real though.
The idea that I want some statist solution to things is wrong. The state is there and this fiscal suggestion is an amelioration of some of its adverse effects in creating the mess in the first place.
What do you suggest can be a help with the sort of problem our friends have where they live, work, grew up, in central London, but cannot find house room to have children? Moving to Stevenage isn't much of a solution. Swapping houses with their parents impoverishes their parents, so that doesn't work either.
The interaction between tax and behaviour foxes me often as I find it counter-intuitive so I may have got the wrong end of your argument.
Izzy Newmania has it, I think; the English idea of a Home is at the heart of our self-identity. Pitt the Elder still rings:
"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
When people in the UK were given the 'right to buy' they did so in droves - and very large numbers of them then rented out their old council houses and moved out to the private suburbs.
The council estate was always the wrong answer to this country's housing problems. Read any copper's blog; more than 80% of police resources, social services resources, welfare benefit resources - in other words, our tax , is expended on maintaining a semblance of order and civilisation amongst those who live on council estates. Those who have a stake in their homes also care about their neighbourhoods, their local primary school, the shopping parade. People are more active in their communities, less tolerant of crime and deviant behaviour. I would dearly love to demolish every council estate in London.
S'funny, when the economists advising the post-war Labour government pointed out that demand for public housing that was equal in every respect to private housing would be infinite, it was determined that council houses should be solid, well built, properly heated - but that room sizes should all be smaller than private homes. Minimum room sizes were designed down to the square inch.
Nowadays of course private housebuilders are building houses with rooms no bigger than those tiny Parker-Morris standards.
One reason we would never swap our Edwardian terrace with its nine-foot ceilings and big spaces for something modern.
Ownership works; freedom to choose works. State intervention doesn't.
I had misunderstood ...usual .
Whats wrong with moving to Stevenage ? I`m having to do something of the sort and so have have most of my friends in the end . Its not ideal but then being less wealthy than you would like to be is never ideal ? My solution is ...stop moaning and get on with it. Its a crisis of expectations only
Slayer speak , I `m not familiar with ( sounds youthful and vibrant so I wouldn`t approve ) but I see you live in Camden as I thought.I 1`m often around the place .
There is no right to afford a house where you live I have to move , I have to commute . This is life for the private sector.
Its an interesting idea now I see what you are getting at . People stay in property because the performance is better ( by far) though don`t they. Sounds a bit complicated to me .
The attempts by the state to use their new powers of surveillance to invent more taxes locally is simply to be resisted by all and any means . They are desperate to break the concept of local taxation being a charge for service and get on the proportional gravy train as in N Ireland and now in Scotland . Think of the joy of being able to ask voters to vote for more of other peoples money for themselves.
Generally though , its not a bad idea , right area at least. Personally I`d leave it I notice there is a rise in team house buying and shared residence recently do perhaps things are sorting themselves out.
Old people often do move to smaller places already and off to the seaside as well? Desirable hosuing is expensive ...well it would be .
Have to get back to work HG I may give this some further thought.
Cheerio
'Camden (for instance) has been surveying occupation levels and setting standards' (HG)
It's because of new legislation about HMO (houses of multiple occupacy). The environmental health department made a bit fuss about this new legislation (Housing Act 2004) and got a load of funding to recruit a load more people (with a golden hello) to enforce it.
Basically they are now licensing HMO's.
I'm in favour of an empty property tax myself. It's no good building all this new housing if investors are just buying half of them up and leaving them empty. At the moment you actually get a 75% discount on your council tax. They could compensate by giving tax breaks on investment in art, antiques and fine wines.
"In 1951 the Conservatives promised to build 300,000 houses a year — nearly twice the present level. That promise swept the country and brought the Conservatives back to power for 13 years."
That's William Rees-Mogg in today's Times.
The state is always present, in every market - try to name a perfectly state-free market - there are always concessions, permissions, fiscal adjustments, intellectual property rights, .....
I wish the Conservatives today would announce they're going to build 300,000 houses, in places where people want to be. All that miserable 'countryside' between Barnet and Potters Bar comes to mind.
I have cycled across that stretch a few times HG living in London as I have for twenty years it always seems like an Edenic paradise to me .
I do agree with you about the impossibility of the perfect markets in particular because the first thing your get is monopolistic behaviour. If you are saying we should build on the green belt I think we have to.
I'm against any rises in council taxes; people are struggling to pay already. It's the fiscal regime associated with housing that is warping investment choices; and I fear that any tax like the one Steven _I suggests would be hard to corral and start applying more widely.
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